Tag: sleep

Sleeping on the weekends

I’ve been doing lots of research into dreams and sleeping and I just wanted to share this nugget of information.

Why is it So Hard to Wake Up in the Morning?

Your clock is controlled by the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a part of the brain that controls the body’s biological rhythms. But, says Jean Matheson, a sleep-disorders specialist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, these preset natural rhythms often don’t align with daily realities—work or school start times cannot be adjusted to fit a person’s sleep schedule. People who have trouble crawling out of bed probably have an inner clock set to late wake-up and sleep times, a condition known as phase delay.

It is possible to adjust your phase-delayed body clock, Matheson says, but at a price: No sleeping in on the weekends. “When people sleep late on weekends, they revert to their natural phase-delayed rhythm,” she explains. This makes it harder to wake up early on weekdays. You can train yourself to wake up earlier, Matheson says, by setting your alarm 15 minutes earlier each day (and heeding its call).

When I was younger, I use to be able to cycle my body clock on the weekend. So I would sleep in late on the weekends but wake up early on weekdays. Now I’m older, I’ve finally come to the realisation that I can’t do it no longer.

Burning the midnight hour

Doc Searls writes about intelligence on his blog. But he talks about sleep too…

Smart people SLEEP LATE yells the headline of this opinion piece in the Winnipeg Free Press. It begins,

Sleep is a fundamental component of animal biology. New evidence confirms that, in humans, its timing reflects intelligence. People with higher IQs (intelligence quotients) tend to be more active nocturnally, going to bed later, whereas those with lower IQs usually retire to bed sooner after nightfall.

After that Doc Searls launches into a discussion about what is IQ and how silly the whole notion of a IQ really is… But what got me was the idea of sleeping late and waking up late.

Since #mybrushwithdeath, back in May/June I’ve been changing my lifestyle around. One of those changes is to do with my time I go to bed. Before I would generally go to bed about 2-3am and wake up about 10am on a week day and on a weekend sometimes go to bed about 9am and wake up about 2pm. Yeah quite shocking… But now I’m going to bed about 12am and getting up about 9am everyday (even weekends).

However things are starting slip, not purposely. Although I’m sticking to the new routine, I’m finding once again that I’m much more productive late evening and at night. I don’t know why, I just am.

I got a feeling I’m fighting nature/biology on this one.

Wake up to light in the mornings

Philips Wake up light

I heard about these light alarms which wake you up using daylight from a large bulb instead of a nasty buzzing noise like traditional alarms. So in an aid to improve my wake up routine I invested in a Philips Wake-up Light HF3463. Of course I never paid 100 pounds for it, actually I picked it up for 20 pounds because I knocked the retailer down again and again due to the bad state of the box, paint on the power lead and that it was a return product.

So far I got to say its working pretty well, I do feel better waking up to the bright light and I tend to wake up about a minute or two before the set time or the noise of blips (which I have mine set to). It all sounds like marketing crap but there is something about the bright light which does work even in my room with lots of glowing leds from machines and mobiles.

Will this be a path to a more healthy lifestyle of waking up early and feeling full of energy? I doubt it, I still feel very rough in the mornings and feel so much more alive at night but anything which gets me up without that jolt has got to be pretty good.

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The benefits to sleeping late

Manchester at Night

This one comes from Wired magazine via Imran Ali again. 3 Smart Things About Sleeping Late. I have to agree with every single one of the points. It still kills me getting up early in the morning but whats worst is when i'm in the creative zone at 1:30am and then have to start heading to bed, knowing theres a bunch of things I could get done if I stayed up a little longer.

1 // You may need more sleep than you think.
Research by Henry Ford Hospital Sleep Disorders Center found that people who slept eight hours and then claimed they were “well rested” actually performed better and were more alert if they slept another two hours. That figures. Until the invention of the lightbulb (damn you, Edison!), the average person slumbered 10 hours a night.

2 // Night owls are more creative.
Artists, writers, and coders typically fire on all cylinders by crashing near dawn and awakening at the crack of noon. In one study, “evening people” almost universally slam-dunked a standardized creativity test. Their early-bird brethren struggled for passing scores.

3 // Rising early is stressful.
The stress hormone cortisol peaks in your blood around 7 am. So if you get up then, you may experience tension. Grab some extra Zs! You'll wake up feeling less like Bert, more like Ernie.

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Another late night rant…

Open times

Ben pretty much sums up what I've been thinking and ranted about many times.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a “night person”. Having been on vacation for two weeks now, I’ve been able to set my own sleeping rhythm (well, more on that in a moment). I settled into a pattern of going to bed around 4am and getting up around mid-day, although some nights I haven’t turned into until 7am.

Yes, getting up at mid-day sounds pretty lazy. But I get so much work done between about 10pm and 4am that it more than makes up for it. It’s been like my old hacker-days when I was at school — I would come home from school and just learn programming, build websites, that kind of thing. I learnt so much by working late at night.

My mind just focuses to another level and I loose track of time as I churn out code, designs, specs, blog posts and goodness knows what else.

When I’m at work, I often will stay at the office until 7pm. Around 4pm, after the meetings and telephone calls have died down I get into that buzz, which continues until home-time.

I'm actually quite lucky because in the past I've worked for a few Cinemas which requires working till 3am on Fridays and Saturdays. Then working for Tesco latenight till 6am on Thursdays and Fridays got me into the habit of changing my sleep patterns on a pence. So although I prefer to work through the night and am actually more productive at night. I can change to going back to 10-6pm with no problems. I think it can all be learned too. Sarah can never work out how i'm able to stay up really late through-out the weekend and then go to work the next day for 5 days. I'm also able to fall a sleep within 5mins of putting my head down – a skill which can be learned too.

But that aside, what happened to the 24 hour culture? Why do tech conferences start at 9am? and why on earth does the London tube shut down at 12:30am on a weekend? I remember one of the neat things about working over night was the odd but interesting things Channel4 use to put on. I could never work with headphones on all the time at night so having the radio or tv on in the background at low volume was ideal. Nowadays I can just put on some podcasts. Geez I would have been so much smarter if timeshifted media was around when I was stacking the shelfs in Tesco.

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